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22 May 2017

Attack is one of the most important and essential skills in chess. You cannot win a chess game if you cannot attack. But many chess players don’t know where to attack and how to start an attack. The right plan is required to deliver a proper and successful attack.

Even the first undisputed world chess champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, used to say that “Only the player with the initiative has the right to attack.”

Today our guest coach CM Tryfon Gavriel has prepared a very instructive video lesson for you. In this video, he will show you a great game played by the 12-year old Magnus Carlsen, where the current World Champion had delivered a successful attack with an amazing Queen sacrifice.

Tryfon Gavriel is a FIDE Candidate Master (CM) with a rating of 2170. He has over 35 years of playing actively both online and offline.He won the Lloyds Under-18 national UK tournament in 1989, and was awarded with the trophy by Grandmaster and PHD Mathematician Dr John Nunn. He also played twice in the main British Chess Championship.

P.S. Did you enjoy watching the game? What is your impression about Tryfon’s lesson? Feel free to write your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.

20 May 2017

In recent times many of my students had requested for me to provide them (and also you) with instructive video lessons. As some of you might know, I’ve a busy schedule and that’s why I was not able to prepare video lessons regularly for you. However, I’m doing my best to coordinate with our guest coaches and give you high quality lessons.

Meanwhile, in an effort to fulfil the requests of some of my students I’ve decided to do something special. I’m providing everyone with an opportunity to get some of my best collection of premium videos, the “GM Smirnov’s Bundle” for FREE!

Yes, we’re conducting a “Like and Comment“ contest on our RCA Facebook page. So how does this contest work and how do you participate to get my premium video collection for FREE?

About the contest

The contest rules are very simple. All you need to do is:

1) ‘Like’ and ‘comment’ on the Contest Post2) Send us a private message (to our RCA Facebook page)3) And, get “GM Smirnov’s Bundle” for FREE!Note: if you don’t know how to send us a private message on Facebook, you’re welcome to check the FAQ here.

What’s a Contest Post?

The Contest Post is like a message posted on our RCA Facebook page. For your convenience, we’ve pinned the post to the top of our page, so you can easily find it on our Facebook page. Below is the screenshot of the Contest Post.

All you need to do is ‘Like’ the Contest Post and ‘comment’ something like “I’m in!” to participate and then send us a private message on Facebook.

After sending us a message, our Support Team will reply to you and provide you with the prize, the “GM Smirnov’s Bundle” within 24 hours! If you face any issues or have any doubts, feel free to report to us by writing in the comments below or by sending an email to support@chess-teacher.com.

1) The Art of endgame ($20)
2) How to win a won game? ($20)
3) Press your opponents like Carlsen ($20)
4) Play like Nakamura ($20)
5) The art of Defense in Chess

The Bundle price is $39 USD – so you get a prize that is really worth it by participating in this contest and that’s really, really MASSIVE! Moreover, all of these videos contain very useful information and they can really help you improve your chess progress.

16 May 2017

Recently we encouraged you to submit your chess games in a blog-post and informed that we’ll analyze the game(s) that gets the maximum number of ‘votes’. First, I’d like to thank everyone who took interest and submitted their games!

The winner is Narayan Joshi, who has got four ‘votes’ for his game – congratulations! I’d like to appreciate other students who had submitted their games as well, and that’s why I decided to do something special and useful for everyone.

In order to help you learn how to analyze YOUR games, I’ve prepared a FREE mini-course “How to analyze your chess games?“. In this course I’ll teach you the universal approach to analyze a chess game.

The course consists of:

1. How to analyze your games?

2. How to analyze your games? (Part-2)

3. How to analyze your games? (Part-3)

4. Conclusions

5. Practical part-1

6. Practical part-2

After the study of this free course, you’ll be able to analyze games like a PRO with the universal approach, and learn from your lost games.

After the study of this course, please feel free to share your feedback with us – you may write your thoughts in the comments below or send an email to support@chess-teacher.com. Thanks beforehand and enjoy your learning!

4 Feb 2017

In the previous article we talked about the typical problems many chess players have. You may want to refer to the first part here. In short, people read A LOT of chess books, but the benefit is MARGINALat best. Why is this the case?

I’ll tell you something seemingly obvious, yet it will have a tremendous effect! There is a HUGE (I mean, extremely HUGE) difference between reading and studying. Unfortunately, most players don’t fully understand this, so let me explain this difference in detail:

1. TIME

How much time do you spend reading a book? Usually you will spend for one book from a few days till several weeks. Thus, reading can be quick.

Studyinga text book can take a month or a lifetime! I’m not exaggerating. For instance, studying a religious book can take a lifetime, and even then you may still not fully understand it. This is closely connected with the next item.

2. REPETITION

Once you have read a book, you never read it again. It seems boring and unnecessary. When you study certain material, you try to implement it in your practice. In this case you’ll need to repeat the process several times to make sure that you understood completely before proceeding.

Once you’ve applied this knowledge in a practical application, you will develop new questions. You will then need to study this material again to find solutions for your new questions. This process may occur many times until you finally get 100% effect out of this knowledge (book).

3. YOUR ACTIVENESS

When you read a book or watch a video, the author of this material is active. He prepared some materials and is providing them to you. You go over this material, however, by yourself, without really doing anything active. This is passive learning, much the same as when you watch a new Hollywood movie – you are a passive viewer.

When you study something, you are independently active. You try and develop solutions yourself, and only after that will you compare your ideas with those of the author. You try to understand every author’s idea. If you don’t understand something – you don’t skip it, but study the material over and over again until all insight come to you.

You try to understand and remember everything. After that you go and try it in practice. You may fail, but you keep trying until you train this new skill enough to get good results.

Studying requires one to be very active.

4. LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY

As you may have guessed, reading is easy. That’s why most of people like it so much! You read something, you feel like you should be getting smarter. You digest ready-made material with little or no effort required from you. This comfortable situation makes you feel good because it is not difficult.

Studying is much harder. Here you have to face your weaknesses, admit them and then put in a hard effort to confront them. You need to spend a lot of time and effort, do unusual things and develop new habits. Inwardly you have to admit that somebody is smarter than you in this area, which is painful for a lot of people.

Reading is entertainment. Studying is a hard work.

5. MEMORISING

A few months after you read something, you only remember the most general ideas from that material.

Let’s create a little test. Have you studied any of my paid courses? Do you remember the titles of each video lesson? What rules were presented in each lesson? How many practical tasks were presented in this course?

Unfortunately, most people can only give very general answers. It means you have NOTstudied these lessons. When you study something seriously, you won’t forget it later because it is learned. It becomes a part of your nature, your new habit.

In many countries people shake hands after a meeting. You never forget to do this. You don’t need to write it in your notebook – it is automatic and becomes a habit.

Studying develops new habits. Reading develops… nothing.

6. FREE/PAID

Not always, but often you can get reading material for free. More often than not, you have to pay for your study course materials.

There is some good news for you here. I’ve been an active chess coach for the past 12 years. During this period I’ve charged $0 (in other words, helped for free) and as much as $100 per hour. I’ve noticed an interesting thing: the more the student pays, the better results he/she gets.

I always try to do my best, so my coaching is the same but the students’ ATTITUDEis very different. For instance, those who paid a lot never come late to the lesson. Free students sometimes even skip the lessons.

Those who made serious investments write down all important information. Some of them even use a voice recorder, so as to repeat the lesson later on. Those who paid little never do. After an expensive lesson, a student always performs his home tasks (even when it seems unnecessary for him).

In the same way, you will probably eat the dish if you paid a lot for it in a restaurant (even if the dish looks unusual for you). It seems silly to pay for something and then not use it. We avoid making silly mistakes.

After a free lesson, a student decides by himself which tasks to perform and how. So he distorts the training and doesn’t get any real results.

All in all, when you pay for something you take it much more seriously. That’s why some tricky guys download tons of free chess materials from the internet, but their real progress is miserable. It’s just fair.

7. EFFECTIVENESS

After you study something new, you can take a qualitative leap forward. You develop new (more effective) skills. You change (improve) your way of playing. You start getting outstandingly great results.

After readingsomething, you feel good. You may be enthusiastic. But when it comes to practice – nothing changes.You still get the same results as before. This upsets you. You want to bring your mood up again and… you start reading another exciting book…

CONCLUSION

Now that we have discussed this topic in great detail, it’s time for you to ask yourself “Am I reading or studying chess materials?” Be honest with yourself. Be objective and take all criteria (your results) into account.

P.S. Have you enjoyed this lesson? Please share it with your friends by using the buttons below.

2 Feb 2017

There are literally millions of chess books and tutorials that are available to us these days and all chess learners study from this same pool of material.

However, only a very small group of players (less than 5%) will experience any significant progress. The majority of players (95%) will unfortunately experience only slight advancement or, worse, no progress at all.

How to deal with such a sad situation? There are two typical approaches:

1. The players belonging to the first group are a little confused and they ask themselves the question (or send the question to me ), “Why am I not progressing despite all of my desire and efforts?“ If you are in this group, please accept my congratulations – you have very good chances for improvement!

2. The second group of players prefers to believe in what they want to believe. They think that they are “experienced,” “advanced,” “experts” or that they “know all the chess basics already,” etc. However, there is a well-known refutation proverb, “If you are so smart, then why are you so poor?” In regards to chess, this proverb basically translates to: “If you know so many things about chess, then why your rating is so low?”

In reply to this obvious question, this 2nd group of players will start providing various lame excuses such as:

“ I’m a good player, but only have problems with tactics (or opening repertoire or anything else)”.

“I don’t want to memorise opening lines, because I like creativity.”

“I have problems with concentration, and sometimes make blunders.”

Being under the delusion of their “advanced” level, such people produce a lot of lame excuses for their poor practical results. They also start blaming chess books, authors, teachers, etc. OK, maybe a certain book was bad, but it’s quite unlikely that all of them are bad, right? So maybe the problem is not there?

All in all, if you are a 2000-rated player and honestly believe that you’ve learned all of the main strategic and tactical motifs – you are in this second group. In this case, I wish you good luck, because there’s nothing else that can help you. Yes, I’m not here to say pleasant things, but to tell you the REAL situation.

Now let’s get back to the first group of people, who wonder, “Why am I not progressing despite all of my desire and efforts?“

Please think about this question. I’ll give you the answer in the next lesson, but in the meantime your independent thinking is very important. Perhaps you’ve learnt A LOT from chess books (or other tutorial materials). Why didn’t it bring you A LOT of a progress?

P.S. Write your opinion in the comments. After thinking about the above question, you may read the second part here.